Chapter Four
Stefan
“You’re late, Stef.” I rolled my eyes at Nate as I walked past him in my tux, headed for the main part of the bar from the hotel lobby I’d walked through. The stage was already set up, and some of the other guys who’d been roped into the event were mingling, having a drink. There were tons of women in the bar, too, and they were definitely dressed to the nines as well. A bunch of signs proclaimed the event in bold, bright prints, full of pink and red and purple: Pre-Valentine’s Bachelor Auction Tonight!
Thankfully, I wasn’t one of the men being auctioned off for a date; when the sign-ups had been going on, I’d still had a girlfriend. When she’d left me, I had kept it on the downlow right up until it would have been too late for Nate to try to convince me to put myself up for auction for a Valentine’s Day date. Instead, I was going to be hosting the event, auctioning off some of the guys from the bar, some hotel staff, and some volunteers, and the proceeds would go to a local shelter that specialized in taming and making pets out of feral cats.
As soon as I started to circulate around the room, the attention started. The ladies were already primed to paw at any of the men wearing a tux, and while I’ve always tried not to have too big a head, I had managed to figure out that I was easy on the eyes years before, when I’d first started doing some minor modeling gigs. So, when the women started coming up to me, asking whether I was up for auction, I smiled and told them no. “Somebody’s gotta keep you lionesses from getting too aggressive with the prey,” I said.
“Oh, come on, Stefan, you could get enough bids to fund Caturday Sanctuary for a year all on your own,” one of the women—someone I knew from the bar—said as I tried to politely get myself free of an older member of the crowd.
“Yeah well, I’m not on the block today,” I told Jessica. “I am strictly talent. Not for sale.”
“That’s a first,” she told me tartly, signaling to the bartender that I’d have a beer.
“It must be a nice change for you, at least,” I pointed out. “Not being the one everyone’s trying to grab.”
Jessica raised an eyebrow at me. “Some of these women want to impress the men pretty strongly, as if that’s going to make a difference in who wins. I’ve had about half a dozen women try and make out with me.”
“Can’t believe I missed that,” I said. I took my beer and headed in the direction of the stage, doing what I could to direct attention from me and onto the men who were actually up for grabs.
I made it to the stage and took the mic one of the hotel staff offered me. “All right, everybody, I think it’s time to get this show on the road, don’t you?” A deafening cheer met me, full of mostly-female voices. “My name is Stefan Doss, and I will be your MC for the evening, running these bids and presenting these men to you. I am not for sale. I want to make that clear. But I will be introducing all you lovely ladies to these great men, and hopefully helping you fulfill your dreams of a romantic Valentine’s Day!”
The men managed to disentangle themselves from the women trying to get at them and lined up on the side of the stage like we’d practiced. I took another sip of my beer and settled into the role I’d been given: hype up the men and control the bidding.
“First up, we have Jackson!” I rattled off the material Jackson had given me and nodded to the DJ, who was running sound. I went through the usual spiel while Jackson posed and half-danced around on the stage, showing himself off. I started the bidding on cue and tried to get the women energetic enough to bid higher, throwing out random “facts” about Jackson. “Come on, ladies! He goes to the gym five days a week; you can’t let all that muscle go to waste…”
I went through a few more of the guys, generating some pretty good bids. Jackson went for five hundred, Phil managed to generate about six hundred, Chuck got someone to bid four-fifty for him, and so on. I called a break, because I was supposed to make the event last over an hour, and went out into the audience again.
“Let me buy you a drink, Stefan!”
I laughed and, after the third or fourth offer, I finally gave in. “Okay, but I want to stick with beer. Nothing hard,” I told the woman cuddling up to me. “I gotta keep my wits about me to make sure I get you ladies to bid high.” I let one or two women buy me beers and then, pretending to be more reluctant than I was, I told them I needed to finish up and encouraged them all to bid high on the rest of the men.
I took the stage again and managed to get some of the women to go up to eight hundred, nine hundred, and finally, for Kevin, the last guy I auctioned off, a thousand dollars.
“I’d pay double for you, Stefan!”
I shook my head, wagging my finger at the woman in the audience who’d shouted that out.
Finally, the event itself was over, and I went back out into the crowd of women. Those who’d managed to win the auctions were busy chatting up the men they’d “bought,” which meant that most of the other women were trying to flirt with anyone else they could. As soon as I was available, I had about half a dozen women trying to talk to me at one time, offering to buy me drinks.
One of them stood out; she was petite, maybe more than a foot smaller than me, in a tight black dress that definitely showed off the length of her legs. “I wish you’d been up for grabs,” she said, looking up at me through thick, long eyelashes.
“Sorry, beautiful,” I told her, smiling down into her face. “But there were lots of guys up there. Plenty of selection to choose from.”
“I didn’t bid on any of them,” she told me, shaking her head. “Once I saw you, I just kind of thought, ‘What’s the point? I’ll just be disappointed with anyone else.’”
“I know all those guys,” I countered. “None of them would disappoint you.”
“They would have,” she insisted. “Because they wouldn’t have been you.”
Some of the other women trying to swarm me started to wander off after other men, and the girl and I started chatting. I didn’t bother getting her name; by the time we were talking, it would have been too late to politely ask. As she wriggled and cuddled up to me, telling me how great I was and how much she would have paid for a date with me, I was starting to get a bit turned on.
“Why don’t we head out for a bit, sweetie?” I definitely wanted to get her away from the rest of the crowd.
“Well, I don’t want to go far, but I definitely would be happy to get out of this bar,” the woman said, giving me a knowing little grin.
We ducked out of the bar, me leaving my half-finished beer behind, and we navigated the ground floor of the hotel—the lobby, and everywhere else we could look—until we found a little alcove, set aside from the traffic, not too far away from the bar. It was probably some kind of closet, but I didn’t care in that moment; I had a hot young thing in my arms, pressing her body against mine and pulling my face down to hers to kiss her.
We started out making out, and I let my hands wander, cupping her breasts through the tight dress she had on, slipping one hand up along her leg, working along her thigh to get under the hem. She moaned against my lips and grinded against me, pressing herself against the hardening ridge at the front of my tux pants. I get my hand up the skirt of her dress and start rubbing her. We weren’t private enough that I wanted to go all the way—not here—but I was getting so turned on that it wouldn’t be long until I didn’t really care.
I pulled up her dress just over her hips, and somehow the woman—I still felt a little guilty about not getting her name—got my fly open and slipped her hand down my pants. She started stroking me while I played with her. Things got hotter and hotter between us, and in the part of my brain still capable of thinking, I started to wonder if we might be able to get a hotel room.
“Stacy? Stacy Jacobs, where the hell are you?”
The woman I was with pulled back with a start, and her eyes went wide. “What?” She giggled quietly and brought the fingers that weren’t wrapped around my erection up to my mouth to press my lips closed.
“Shh. It’s my dad,” she said.
“Your dad?” I kept my voice at a whisper. “Fuck. Tell me you’re over eighteen, at least.”
“Of course,” Stacy said, sounding indignant. “I’ll be twenty-one this August.”
“You’re twenty?” I pulled back and took my hand out of her skirt.
“Oh, come on, I’m legal!” she said in a whisper.
“Barely,” I muttered.
“Stacy! You were supposed to meet your mother and me for dinner fifteen minutes ago!”
Stacy smoothed her dress down over her hips and gave me a grin. “I could call you after,” she suggested.
“No,” I told her. “Thanks for the offer and all, but you’re a bit young for me.”
She pouted, but her father was still calling for her up and down the hall outside of where we’d hidden ourselves.
“Go, before he busts in here and tries to shoot me,” I said.
She slipped out of the closet and I stayed in, covering my mouth with my arm to muffle the groan that left me. I was still painfully hard, but obviously that wasn’t going to get solved anytime too soon.